


And this of all my Hopes

by middlemarch



Category: Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)
Genre: Backstory, Becoming Parents, Conversations, F/M, Family, Jedi, Pregnancy, Revelations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-20 13:38:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13147842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: A series of confessions.





	1. Chapter 1

“Did you really know all the time?” Finn asked. He didn’t sound angry or annoyed, mostly baffled. Well, she couldn’t blame him. 

“About my parents? Yes. I think I did, even if,” Rey said, breaking off, her mind’s eye suddenly filled with the dunes of Nyrrah on Jakku, where the skeleton of a long-abandoned ship could be revealed by a change in the air—and just as suddenly disappear in the pale gold sand. She felt herself becoming distant and how Finn pulled her back by taking her hand in his.

“Even if?” he repeated patiently, as if she deserved patience. As if she deserved anything.

“If I didn’t want to admit it. It wasn’t how he said though,” Rey explained. Where was Kylo now? She couldn’t sense him through the Force as she had and she couldn’t say that she missed it. She understood him better now but she didn’t, couldn’t excuse him. 

“Kylo Ren? What could he know about it? About your family—or anyone’s?” Finn exclaimed. 

“Not the whole of it. Of my family or his own, I think. Though he wanted to, wants to…he said they sold me, for drink, and maybe they did, but I remember my mother crying, she was holding my arm, she wouldn’t let go. I thought she might want to come back for me, if she could,” Rey said, feeling the memory more than recalling it. Her mother had had a tattoo that began on her hand and curled up her arm and a burn on her wrist from making ayre-seed gruel. Her father had cast a shadow, cool and despairing, over them both. Then there had been other hands on her, impersonal, and a vast disinterest in anything about her other than what she could produce.

“I think, maybe, I see,” Finn said. He was still holding her hand. It meant something different to him, because he reached for her so often. 

“We could look for your family. Someday. When it’s safer, when we’re not in hiding,” she offered. His eyes did not get wider but something shifted in his expression. 

“I wouldn’t know where to start. I was too little, I don’t even know what they called me,” he said. There was anger and its lover fear; he had as great a reason for both as she did but was given less leeway, ever since Poe threw him his jacket and Finn had caught it.

“We could find out. I know we can,” she said seriously, tightening her hold on his hand.

“Because you’re a Jedi? Because of the Force?” he asked a little bitterly.

“Because you’re you and I’m me. Because it would be worth it to try—if you wanted it,” she said. There had been a lot he’d wanted since escaping the Stormtroopers and he’d gotten hardly any of it. It had been all sacrifice and daring, battles and terror. 

“D’you think they’d even remember me?” he said, ducking his head, looking down at where their hands were clasped.

“Oh, yes, Finn. They’d remember you,” Rey said. “Anyone would remember you.”


	2. Chapter 2

Poe missed that damn jacket. He hadn’t thought he would and had just tossed it to Finn, enjoying the way it sailed through the air, how Finn caught it. The smile on Finn’s face—how could he ever regret it? But he did.

Regret—he wasn’t familiar with it. A passing acquaintance, perhaps. Failure, yes, and loss, those he knew as well as any member of the Resistance, anyone born during this bleak time when all the light was from stars and what you could gin up within yourself. He played sabacc and flew whatever ship they gave him, better than anyone save General Solo; women eyed him and men, tired ones and the jaded, the new recruits who were taken in by a quick grin, the way he laid his hand on the cockpit. He knew Leia Organa was fond of him for a hundred reasons and when one faded, another took its place. 

Something had changed. Finn, a defector, a refugee, who’d taken to him like a stray, had moved beyond him; the man had been to Maz’s and fought beside Solo while Poe had flown reliably daring runs. There was this new woman, this Rey everyone talked about, who made him curious in a way he hadn’t been for a long time. Since he’d wondered what Leia Organa had been like as a young woman, a beautiful Princess-spy, and she’d caught him at it, murmuring “Too much for you to handle, Dameron, in this lifetime or the next.” She hadn’t bothered to wink.

Poe felt greedy, desperate. He wished he’d had a chance to go to school or be tutored, to learn to read the Four languages instead of just Basic and a mechanic’s manual. He’d never been in love and Leia had never shown him one artifact from Alderaan. Finn wore the jacket and Holdo had been right about him. He was smaller than he’d thought.

“I’m Rey,” she said. He held the hand that had moved a world to get to Finn and he couldn’t feel the Force in it. Once, he might have kissed her knuckles to see if she blushed; now he just held the callused palm against his own and wondered what came next. What—or who. And just where he’d be, if there would be sky or space in his eyes when it did. Rey looked at him. She knew.


	3. Chapter 3

He’d wanted a girl. He’d wanted a baby, maybe not right then, but he had wanted to have more of a family than the three of them, Luke and Leia and himself somehow not enough in some critical way. Leia had come to him with her brow furrowed, as uncertain as he’d ever seen her, and it had been nothing to show her how happy he was. To lift her chin with one finger and nod at her.

Han hadn’t told her he wanted a daughter, but he called the baby “she” enough than Chewie had remarked on it. The pregnancy had been hard for Leia, no easier after a med-droid blithely announced the second fetus had not survived. She fainted regularly and had nightmares, ones where she woke screaming, ones where he woke to find her face in a rictus, tears running into her hair, completely silent. Luke had congratulated them, then absconded to Ahch-To to work on rebuilding the sanctuary and Han wished Winter would have stayed with them or even Amilyn with her violet hair and her affectations. She hadn’t won any battles yet but she was good at the intricate Alderaanian tile-games that Leia enjoyed and which bored him silly. He’d wanted a daughter who would dote on him when her mother didn’t, take his side when he was wrong. To console her mother when he didn’t, if he couldn’t.

She’d known, of course. Well before the prolonged delivery that had terrified him, she had seen it in his eyes, heard the wanting in his tone. They had said they would wait to be surprised, but she wasn’t surprised. Hardly anything surprised Leia after Alderaan. She must have spent the last months preparing for the expression on his face when they told him the baby was a boy, that he had a son. A son. He’d agreed to the name before she even stopped speaking. He wondered about it later. Why she’d named the baby for the man that was her brother’s mentor, not her own. What it meant about Luke and the boy, that she thought to give him old Ben Kenobi’s name and memory, instead of anything that was just his own.

He’d wanted a girl. You rolled the dice, the galaxy decided. Not the Force, although he believed now, not Fate, though he didn’t. He never asked about the babies she lost but he knew. 

He’d wanted a girl with her dark eyes. Ben had them, kept them open when he killed him.


	4. Chapter 4

She wasn’t in love with Finn. In her half-awake state, blood loss and shock balanced out by what bacta they had on hand, Rose dimly understood he might think so. She hadn’t meant to kiss him; she wanted to raise her hand and touch his cheek, to let him know she cared, but her arm was broken and disobedient. He was a good man but unexpectedly stupid, taken in by Canto Bight and his hatred of Phasma, clumsy too about what passed for basic manners in the Resistance. That might be the Stormtrooper upbringing—she saw how it relaxed him to do things in lockstep synchrony even if he despised it in himself. Paige would have said something, that was her way but it wasn’t Rose. Or it hadn’t been and now it might be.

So many mistakes! Trusting Poe, trusting DJ, forgetting to say goodbye to Paige—those were the ones she knew about, the ones who depths she could plumb. Talking to Finn—was that a mistake or a promise? Refusing to pray, pretending there was no Force; would she alone be blamed or would others suffer for it? The earth on Crait was red, but not like any blood she’d ever seen. She’d been entranced by it, the way Finn had been at the casino, and it hadn’t seemed so bad to think that vivid color, Finn’s soft mouth would be what she took with her into the dark. But now she had neither and both, the memory and the nightmare, Finn’s eyes the color of the earth, his mouth bitter as mineral or beseeching. She wanted to turn in the bunk but she couldn’t for the bandages and the wounds they hid. She wanted her sister to come and stroke her hand while she berated her, someone she could curse at when she opened her eyes but it was the General herself beside her. They said she had flown through space in that same grey mantle and Rose could believe it even if she didn’t know what it meant Leia Organa had become. Or revealed. 

“I didn’t mean it,” she heard herself saying. Croaking, whispering. Finn was her companion, her friend; he was beloved of her, but not by her. Someone, one of the dead bombers maybe, had once said Alderaan had a thousand words for affection but they’d all been lost with the planet. Not even fragments remained, not even the breath you took before you spoke; not even the person who spread the rumor.

“We never do, little Rose,” Leia said, the hand that had commanded space holding hers. She sounded tired and that was a comfort, that she could be tired and sad. That she knew mistakes and how to make them. And how to make them count.


	5. Chapter 5

“I won’t.”

“I don’t think so.”

“No.”

How many times had she told Luke no? That she would not train with him as a Jedi, that she did not want to read the ancient text he’d found, she did not want to learn what he felt was essential? Why was once not enough?

How many times had she stopped herself from saying, “I can do that already!” How many times had she bitten her lip when he was going on and on about some skill he’d finally mastered, some lesson of Master Yoda’s he’d finally understood—when she had known all along? When there were tasks she could undertake that he didn’t comprehend?

Ben Kenobi didn’t come to visit her. Nor did the man who fathered her, who would always be Vader and not Anakin. There were Force-ghosts Luke didn’t know—the Master who’d mastered Yoda, the Singer from the depths who could induce trance, the one she called the butterfly who showed her flight. Luke was so eager, so earnest, and she was so very busy with trying to recreate a galaxy that was governed by principle and compassion; he built his Temple and she built her State. And if while she slept, she spoke in tongues long dead, beautiful languages she heard when she woke, if she saw the future and the past layered like the elaborate Corellian dessert Han devoured, Luke did not need to know. He would ask a thousand questions and never listen to the answers. She had a certain sympathy for Yoda and Kenobi for a pupil who defied them at every turn; a certain, definite disapprobation for two who taught their student so poorly.

She didn’t want to give her brother her son, but she knew the boy would run away if she didn’t. Perhaps the Temple would save him as she couldn’t; his father laughed too much at evil. She had been intended to give him a sister but she had not been able to. After the third time, Han refused to sleep with her until she had a treatment to prevent conception; Leia had nearly died with the one she called Thyrza, whose soul had called out, soprano, as she came apart into atoms.

She’d known a farm-boy would only come to her rescue, not her request. That a smuggler would only want royalty and exaltation. That Lando would watch her and see there was more, that Chewbacca would always make the right choice. There was no mother for her son without his sister and so she gave him an uncle. She failed. Now, she had to hope that Rey would provide the inflection point. Han was not a ghost but he came to her in dreams and they spent long days on the shores of Lake Kalla, a retreat they had never had. He was young again and he remembered the boy who’d killed him, the boy with her eyes.

“Yes,” she said to Rey. “I will. We, you and I, we can.”

**Author's Note:**

> Some ideas I have that (to me) make the Star Wars universe make a little more sense. Title is from Emily Dickinson.


End file.
